64 research outputs found

    Internet functions in marketing: multicriteria ranking of agricultural SMEs websites in Greece

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    Δημοσιεύσεις μελών--ΣΔΟ--Τμήμα Λογιστικής, 2013The invasion of new technologies combined with the high cost for running shop force enterprises to search for new sales methods. Network applications and ICT (Information and Communication Technology) can help achieve e-commerce goals. In Greece, many enterprises in the agro-food and drink sectors are already present on the internet. This paper studies the adoption of e-commerce on websites that support e-commerce activities within the agro-food and drink sectors. Therefore, the paper aims to identify and evaluate their qualitative and quantitative content characteristics, rank them according to 6 content characteristics/criteria using the multicriteria method of PROMETHEE II and classify them in groups of similar adoption. The findings of this study reveal the rate of adoption of e-commerce in the sectors and can serve as a valuable model for the designers of websites that promote e-commerce activities within the wider areas of food and drinks

    A qualitative analysis of consumer attitudes on adoption of online travel services

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    The study reported in this paper explores consumers\u27 experiences with technology-assisted service encounters by investigating the applicability of Mick and Fournier\u27s paradoxes of technology adoption to the online travel agents\u27 services scenario. In-depth interviews were conducted to explore consumers\u27 experiences when using travel agents\u27 online services and the results were compared to those of Mick and Fournier. The findings are similar, suggesting that when consumers adopt online technology they can simultaneously develop positive and negative attitudes. The findings of this study also suggest that the nature of some of the paradoxes experienced by consumers may depend on the industry (travel industry in this study) and the technology (the Internet in this study) being investigated; consumers can develop multiple attitudes towards certain source elements, resulting in existence of contradictory views and attitudes. In terms of Mick and Fournier\u27s paradoxes, the findings of this study indicate that when consumers use technology assisted service encounters for travel agents\u27 services they are most likely to experience control/chaos, freedom/enslavement, competence/incompetence, efficiency/ inefficiency, engaging/disengaging, assimilation/isolation paradoxes and least likely to experience the new/ obsolete paradox

    Relationship marketing practices for retention of corporate customers in hospitality contract catering

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    Customer retention is specific to the context of each firm, and this is rarely recognized in models for customer retention. This paper studies how customer retention in hospitality business-to-business contract catering depends on the relationship substance built up due to interaction between the parties. Relationship substance may be of a more or less embedded ind, which is explored here in the form of relationship satisfaction and organizational change in the buying firm. A conceptual model is developed and tested on a sample of business relationships in business-to-business contract catering. The results support the fundamental effect that relationship satisfaction improves customer retention. The research also finds that the purchase development of contract catering customers increases retention, in particular if the customer who purchases more is also satisfied. However, when the contract caterer has achieved change in the customer firm, customer is reduced. Evidently, these customers consider that they are done with the seller and move to other sellers, or reduce their purchases altogether

    DEVELOPING HUMAN RESOURCES’ SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE IN TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY THROUGH THE DETERMINATION OF QUALITY OF TRAINING PROGRAMS

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    Research into tourism and hospitality training field has been focused on the subjects of training need assessments, training evaluation models, training within organizational frameworks and useful training techniques. Despite the significance of the above aspects, less afford has been made in the field of training quality and particularly in defining those factors that the quality of a training program consists of. Taking into account that training is a service which the organization, the producer, delivers to its employee, the consumer, this research is going one step further and not only exams SERVQUAL in the training field, but tries to examine inductively at distinctive training quality dimensions from the perspective of trainees point of view that are not subject of other service industry. The definition of training quality dimensions can lead those who develop a new training program to use those dimensions as a framework for greater training outcomes. Moreover, this research tests how the GAP model is compared with the measurement of perceptions merely and the measurement of expectations lone of training quality, as defined by the trainees

    Investigating attitudes towards mobile commerce for travel products

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    This paper focuses on investigating the relationship between the advantages and drawbacks of mobile shopping for travel products (mobile commerce), in contrast to conventional in-store shopping from brick and mortar travel agents, and consumers\u27 perception of the innovation characteristics (relative advantage, compatibility and complexity) of m-shopping. In this vein, the present survey investigates also the corre-lation between consumers\u27 perception of these characteristics and their intention to adopt m-shopping. The above relationships were examined on a sample consisting of 116 individuals in Greece that have used electronic commerce or mobile commerce (or both) in the past. According to the findings, it appears that the advantages and drawbacks of physical effort and time pressure associated to conventional in-store shopping from a travel agent have a positive impact on consumers\u27 perception of the characteristics of mobile shopping (m-shopping). The findings also provide evidence that consumers\u27 perception of the relative advantage and compatibility of mobile travel shopping have another positive impact on their future behavioural intentions to adopt m-shopping. Last, it was also examined if income, education and age moderate these relationships. Overall, these findings have significant implications for the con-tent of mobile commerce services for travel products and the segmentation and target-ing strategy of providers of such services

    Are Greeks’ Unconcerned about Ethical Market Choices?"

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    An Ethical Unconcern (EthU) scale was constructed and its impact on Positive Ethical Consumption was examined. The procedure of EthU included literature search, brainstorming and discussion groups to generate the preliminary pool of 99 items, refinement of the scale via a students’ survey by the employment of item-to-total correlation and alpha-if-item deleted techniques. The initial scale was tested in a consumer survey conducted in the urban area of Thessaloniki, Greece. Item-to-total correlation and alpha-if-item deleted techniques were applied again, followed by Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) by the employment of PCA. The procedure left 21 items in five factors with eigenvalues greater than 1 explaining 61.34% of the variance. The five factors were named Boycott/ Discursive, Fair-Trade, Scepticism, Powerlessness and Ineffectiveness. The AMOS SPSS was then used to conduct confirmatory factor analysis. Goodness-of-fit results indicated that the measurement model fit the data well (χ2=594.226, p<0.000, CFI=0.926, NFI=0.899, TLI=0.910, RMSEA=0.066). The examination of the Positive Ethical Consumption indicated rare to occasional ethical buying choices among Greek consumers. The inhibiting role of Ethical Unconcern on Positive Ethical Consumption was found to be rather low.

    Examining the Relationship between Emotions, Customer Satisfaction and Future Behavioral Intentions in Agrotourism

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    Marketers have been working tirelessly to determine the factors that lead to customer satisfaction presuming that customer satisfaction automatically leads to repeated customers. Service quality, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and repeat business are issues well recognized and investigated by researchers. Recent theory however suggests that service quality alone doesn’t necessarily encourage customers to repeat their choices, but rather, “complete” customer satisfaction does Thus, the main research question addressed in this paper is how to complete the relationship between “complete” customer satisfaction and repeat business. The customer’s emotions have been proved to be a key determinant to turn a satisfied customer into a repeated one. The research was conducted in 2009, addressed to customers of agrotourism businesses on Lesvos Island and Florina – Greece

    Military Service, Destination Image and Repeat Visitation on a Greek Border Island

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    The obligatory military service for adult Greek male citizens creates a particular form of domestic “tourism”, although the members of the Armed Forces are not officially included in tourism statistics. Aim of this paper that takes as a case study the Greek border island of Samothrace in the Northern Aegean is to discuss how the so-called here “army tourism” could be used to develop a competitive advantage for the destination. A structured questionnaire method has been used in order to a) identify aspects of the soldiers’ “tourist” behaviour, b) evaluate destination image from the soldiers’ point of view, c) find out whether the soldiers wish to return as tourists to the island or not and underline the reasons leading to this decision and finally d) analyze the soldiers’ word-of-mouth

    EPOS: e-Procurement optimized system for the healthcare marketplace

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    One of the goals of procurement is to establish a competitive price, while e-procurement utilises electronic commerce to identify potential sources of supply, to purchase goods and services, to exchange contractual information and to interact with suppliers. Extensive academic work has been extensively devoted to e-procurement in diverse industries. However, applying e-procurement in the healthcare sector remains unexplored. It lacks an efficient e-procurement mechanism that will enable hospitals and healthcare suppliers to electronically exchange contractual information, aided by the technologies of optimisation and business rules. The development and deployment of e-procurement requires a major effort in the coordination of complex interorganisational business process. This article presents an e-procurement optimised system (EPOS) for the healthcare marketplace, a complete methodological approach for deploying and operating such system, as piloted in public and private hospitals in three European countries (Greece, Spain and Belgium) and suppliers of healthcare items in the fourth country (Italy). The efficient e-procurement mechanism that EPOS suggests enables hospitals and pharmaceutical and medical equipment suppliers to electronically exchange contractual information

    A New Framework for the Citation Indexing Paradigm

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    A new citation indexing paradigm is proposed: the cascading citation indexing framework (c2IF, for short). It improves the way research publications are assessed for their impact in promoting science and technology. Given a collection of articles and their citation graph, citations are considered at the (article, author) level. Each one article is uniquely identified by means of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI, http://www.doi.org). To identify each one author uniquely, a Universal Author Identifier (UAI) scheme is established. In addition to the citations directly made to a given (article, author) pair, citation paths that target each one citing article are also considered. The granularity of the paradigm is further increased by introducing the concept of the chord, whereby a citation path of length one co-exists with paths of length two or higher, involving the same source- and target- articles. The c2IF output emerges in the form of a medal standings table, analogous to the one that ranks teams at athletic events: when two (article, author) pairs receive the same number of (direct) citations, the one that is cited by more popular articles (i.e. articles that comprise targets to a larger number of paths in the citation graph), is assigned a higher rank value
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